December Traditions Continued
I might have gotten a little ahead of myself yesterday...putting the decorations before the tree...
I grew up with an artificial tree. I don't ever remember chopping down a tree each year. We just brought the tree up from the basement in a big box. I do remember throwing a lot of tinsel (remember that stuff?) on the branches, but never a real tree.
Enter my husband...
When we got married he was adamant about chopping down a Christmas tree each year. He even knew the farm we would go to and last year, for the first time, he actually WORKED on the tree farm with all his Italian cousins...
It's taken me awhile to "get over" the concept of the "perfect" tree and rather, to relish in the experience.
Having grown up with an artificial tree, there was an expectation that it was going to look a specific way each and every year...the branches, the shape, the color, the height...everything would be perfect...
When you go searching to chop down a tree, you never know what you're going to get...
For someone looking to find a "perfect" tree, this could cause a bit of an emotional upheaval... (ya'll just stop laughing at me for one second because I am fully aware that I'm putting wayyy too much stock into this whole perfect tree concept...)
Nevertheless, I've come a long way...now, I am able to enjoy the process...the hot cocoa, the traipsing through the trees, the memories that we make, regardless of whether we find the "perfect" height or branch size...
our goal now, is just to find a tree that looks green enough that will last in the tree stand until the weekend after Christmas when we eventually take it down...and not catch fire in the house due to the dryness of the branches because the life has been sucked out of it...(wow that sounds so "christmasy" doesn't it?)
And wouldn't ya know...every year, we STILL end up finding that "perfect" tree...and when it's all said and done...the special decorations are up, the lights are twinkling, the candles are burning around our house and we're reading our Advent book (more on that later)...it turns out, THAT tree becomes our Favorite and the most Perfect tree that we could have ever found...
funny how that happens...
